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Does your company love its customers? Think about this honestly
for a moment. Because the stark reality is that most businesses
don’t love their current customers; they love acquiring new ones.
If you’ve ever felt that your cell phone provider or other
business is treating their brand new customers better than you, a
loyal customer of 10 years, then you know what I mean.

“Lock-in mechanisms — mobile phone contracts, proprietary
technology, and frequent-flier programs, for example — don’t
create loyalty; they just create barriers to leaving… In the long
run, you’ll always be able to use your iPhone on
another network, migrate your Microsoft
Word files to Google
Docs, and plant your body on a comfortable plane from Virgin
Atlantic that makes you forget your mileage balance.
Customer-obsessed companies worry more about flexing to meet
customer needs and less about ways to block them from fleeing.”

Yes, any business wants their customers to love them. Yes, any
business wants their customers to stay and be loyal. However, you
can’t focus on trying to get customers to love you; you can only
love your customer and hope the feeling will become mutual.

As the CEO of a small company in a rather mature market, I
quickly learned that loving our customers would be the only way
to make any headway in a competitive field. For us, loving our
customers boils down to five things:

Know your customers: No matter how big your business gets and
how much staff you bring on, I always advise business owners and
top management to stay as close to their customers as possible.
Talking to customers one-on-one is the best way to truly take the
pulse of the market, customer needs, and just how your company is
doing. Metrics and market data yield fantastic insight, but
nothing beats personal conversations with the people that make up
your target base.

Listen to your customers (even the noisy ones): With social
media, customers are sharing their experiences and airing their
opinions louder than ever. Yet too many companies choose not to
listen. Successful companies recognize that their customers
possess good ideas. They gather feedback at any and every
opportunity and track real-time sentiment and issues from
monitoring social networks. There's no better source to tell you
how you’re doing than the customers themselves. And customers
love a responsive organization; so keep people in the loop of how
their feedback was used or why it wasn’t this time.

Genuinely want to help your customers: I began my business
because I love helping other entrepreneurs and I love the concept
of the small business. If you don’t feel a genuine connection to
your customers, you might want to consider a different line of
business.

Surprise your customers: Exceeding your customer’s
expectations falls on the opposite side of the spectrum from
those tricky lock-in strategies. The best example here is
Zappos,
who advertises free ground shipping, but mails most orders
overnight. That’s a company that went from no sales to $1 billion
in gross merchandise sales in just 10 years.

Don’t be afraid of ‘Love’: The era of ‘feelings aren’t
professional’ is over. When an employee or customer shows up with
their heart, the end is always far greater. I’m an expressive
person by nature. While I may have toned down outward displays of
affection early on, I’m pretty well known now for ending calls
with employees, contractors, or customers with ‘Love You.’

Of course, what’s natural to me isn’t going to hold true for
everyone. As a business leader, it’s your job to intentionally
set the emotional tone of your company, department, or brand. The
key is to figure out what level of emotional intensity you want
to bring to your organization.

Love can be an incredibly effective business tool. After all,
it’s emotion that shapes our thoughts, words, and actions. Don’t
be afraid to love your employees, your colleagues, your clients,
and customers; you’ll get even more back in return.